public health

Public health has had a magnificent and resplendent history. Sadly, the public health establishment has strayed far from its glorious origins and has gone from a lean, effective medical discipline composed of dedicated, independent physicians and health care workers to a bloated, politicized, entrenched, bureaucracy more concerned with political agendas — and its own existence and budgets — than the public health it had been charged to protect.

Research Europe Reporter: Hi Dr. Faria, I am a reporter for Research Europe, and I cover US research and science policy news. I am hoping to speak with you today because I am writing an article about the fact that President Obama has issued a memorandum directing the CDC and other scientific agencies to research the causes and prevention of gun violence, loosening the current restrictions on federal funding in that field.

In Part I of this three-part series I laid out the background and general intentions of public health gun control activists in the early years of their campaign. In this part we relate the events that led to exposure of the Centers for Disease Control in its crucial roles.

That [public health researchers] prefer the term “gun violence” is revealingof their mind set in approaching the problem, because it puts the emphasison guns and not on the humans who misuse them.Dr. Timothy Wheeler, Director,Doctors for Responsibie Gun Ownership (DRGO)

AJC Reporter (Questions): Hello — This is Craig Schneider with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution [AJC]. I am writing a story on the controversy surrounding gun-related research, and I would greatly appreciate if you would give me a call.

Dr. Miguel Faria (Answers): Hi Craig, I received your questions and have arranged them in a question and answer format for convenience.

Many Americans, even physicians, are unaware that the National Research Council, which is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, proclaimed in February 1993 that “the AIDS epidemic will have little impact on the lives of most Americans or the way society functions.” Moreover, the CDC has released the year-end AIDS figures for 1992 which show that “the overall cases increased only 3.5% from the year before, less than the 5% increase from 1990-1991.” Furthermore, as recently reported by National Review, the CDC enunciated that it was revising downward its estimate of future AIDS

The role of gun violence and street crime in the United States and the world is currently a subject of great debate among national and international organizations, including the United Nations. Because the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the individual right of American citizens to own private firearms, availability of firearms is greater in the U.S. than the rest of the world, except perhaps in Israel and Switzerland.

Science is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of certainty, elusive as these noble goals may be, in contradistinction to bolstering ignorance, superstition, or willful misunderstanding. After all, science is charged with the attainment of general truths and the solving of the riddle of the mechanics and operations of the general laws of the universe.

The lessons of history clearly demonstrate to those of us who care to look that whenever science and medicine have come to be under the heavy hand of government, political pressures, or subordinated to the state, the results have been as perverse as they have been disastrous. Towards this end, I would like to share with you an egregious chapter on the perversion of science in the name of politics and ideology that has come down to us from the recent historic record.

The 1991 American Medical Association (AMA) campaign against domestic violence (and towards gun control) launched for public relations and media consumption went hand in hand with a previously articulated (1979) U.S. Public Health Service objective of complete eradication of handguns in America, beginning with a 25% reduction in the national inventory by the year 2000!(1)

As a physician, I have always been a staunch supporter of public health in its traditional role of fighting pestilential diseases and promoting health by educating the public as to hygiene, sanitation, and preventable diseases, as alluded to in my book, Vandals at the Gates of Medicine; but I deeply resent the workings of that unrecognizable part of public health incarnated in the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) with its politicized agenda and proclivity towards result-oriented research based on junk science.

Jacob Sullum, Reason Magazine editor and featured speaker at the Banquet of the 55th Annual Meeting of the AAPS in Raleigh, North Carolina on October 10, 1998, spoke on "Doctor's Orders: How Public Health Lobbyists Prescribe Morality." With many Tobacco suits having been settled since Sullum's address, a look at his book is enlightening. On the frontispiece, the author quotes former Surgeon General C.

Last year, when the tobacco companies said they would no longer cooperate with the effort to pass a federal anti-smoking bill, the Clinton administration said it didn't really matter. "We will get bipartisan legislation this year," Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala told NBC. "There's no question about it, because it's about public health."(1)

As the controversial debate over mandatory vaccine policy heats up igniting passions, it is perhaps appropriate we summarize what is known about the manifest benefits of modern vaccines, not forgetting the tremendously salutary impact on health and longevity wrought about by better living conditions, hygiene and sanitation, in general, and the introduction and subsequent widespread use of antibiotics, in particular.

While the CDC and Arthur Kellermann, M.D. have been siginificantly slowed in their gun prohibitionist agenda (see Medical Sentinel 1997;2(2):46-53 and 1997;2(3):81-86, and the references cited therein), others have picked up the gun control agenda under the pretended theme of "finding solutions to the problem of guns and violence in America."

Dear Editor, The expressed sentiments are so irresistibly logical and articulate, unemotional (which is good, because we put up resistance to emotion most of the time fearing that we will look like kooks if we get caught up in it). I truly like what you all are doing. More than that I love the truth. The truth should sell itself and I think it will if we use the power of repetition more than we use emotion.

Dear Dr. Faria, Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your courageous efforts to present "the other side" of the rather strained assertion which I will summarize as, "Bullets are a pathogen, and guns are thus a medical epidemic, which we are justified in treating with the same kind of public health measures we would direct toward the elimination of, say, an outbreak of Salmonella typhi."

Public health has had a magnificent and resplendent history. Sadly, the public health establishment has strayed far from its glorious origins and has gone from a lean, effective medical discipline composed of dedicated, independent physicians and health care workers to a bloated, politicized, entrenched, bureaucracy more concerned with political agendas --- and its own existence and budgets --- than the public health it had been charged to protect.

Evidence mounts that Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old disturbed individual accused of the attempted assassination of blue dog, conservative Democrat, U.S Representative Gabrielle Giffords; the cold-blooded killing of five other citizens, including an innocent 9-year-old student and a conservative judge; and the wounding of fourteen people --- should have been under psychiatric treatment.

Ultimately, liberalism destroys everything it touches. The disease's carriers, however, go on and on, infecting innocent bystanders and even entire institutions with a dread disease without so much as a single pang of conscience.

Thank you for your kind introduction. It's my pleasure to have the opportunity to address this distinguished audience of physician colleagues and fellow scientists in Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP). I want to talk about the issue of scientific integrity in public health and firearm research. This is a topic like many others in which you have only heard one side of the story.

In Part I, we discussed in general terms some of the shortcomings I encountered in many of the grant proposals submitted during my stint as a grant reviewer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) in the years 2002-2004 [6]. There is no reason to believe that these epidemiologic and scientific shortcomings have been addressed and corrected in subsequent years.

During the years 2002-2004, I served in the Injury Research Grant Review Committee (IRGRC, more recently the "Initial Review Group") of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) - more specifically, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC).

In Part I of this essay, we discussed the secret epidemic of dengue fever, the Cuban gulag, and other aspects of Cuban medicine leading to a poor state of health in that Caribbean island, based on Dr. Dessy Mendoza Rivero's book ¡Dengue!-La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel Castro (Dengue! The Secret Epidemic of Fidel Castro).

Diary of Dreams performs at the 2016 M’era Luna festival in Hildesheim, Germany. M’era Luna, “one of the biggest dark music events in Germany,” is held each year on the second weekend in August. Close to 25,000 people attend the festival annually to hear gothic, metal and industrial music performed on two large festival-style stages.